If you’re a fan of Ready Player One, you’ll enjoy Ready Player Two.
Ready Player Two picks up where Ready Player Two ended. We find our heroes struggling with wealth. To compensate, some characters focus on a cause, while others, find cause for laziness.
The book is full of marvelous insights and predictions; this foresight is the brilliance of Ernest Cline’s writing.
Ernest Cline describes everything in vivid detail; sometimes, at the story’s expense. Just get on with the story — I don’t care that the car’s purple paint sparkled in the afternoon sunlight. It’s a purple car, now let’s move on.
I’d hoped the second book would follow a different formula than the first book. The first book was about introducing the OASIS, the characters and the quest. Much of the story happened inside the OASIS. Wouldn’t it be cool if the second quest required interaction with both the OASIS and the outside world? It would be like Ready Player One and The Da Vinci Code had a baby.
But that didn’t happen.
About a 3rd of the way through the book, I thought the book was reimagining “The Matrix” movies. But thankfully, that also didn’t happen.
A nit with the main character, Parzival, is he pined over Samantha (Art3mis) too much. No woman wants a man-child as a boyfriend/husband.
In the end, I enjoyed the book, and I’m hoping for a 3rd iteration. Without giving too much away, I’ll say Ready Player Two ended in such a way that a third book is not a foregone conclusion.
Chuck Conway is a father who believes the books we read and patterns we question can reshape not just our lives, but the generations that follow. He lives in California with his wife, daughter, and cat Mango, writing about the ideas that impact him. Not expert advice, just observations from someone doing the work. Connect with him on Substack or YouTube.